Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwery | Hacker News Reader

Is the use of the "E" notation common in JS? I can see that it (could be) less bytes, obviously more efficient for bigger values... Looking at the script I can see it is minified or whatever we call that these days. I guess my question really is: did someone write "5E3" or did the minifier choose it?

(Sorry this is heading into the weeds, but I'm not really a web developer so maybe someone can tell me!)

View on HN

Because 5E3 is shorter than 5000, just like you can often see !0 to get "true" in minimize code because it saves two characters.

In js I thought 1==true, and 1 is shorter than !0 ??

Never seen the use of exponential notation for numbers in js though (not a surprise, I'm not really a programmer), it seems sensible to me from the point of shifting the domain from ms to seconds.

> In js I thought 1==true, and 1 is shorter than !0 ??

`1==true` but `1!==true` (`===` and `!==` check for type equality as well and while `!0` is a boolean, `1` is not.

!0 === true, but 1 !== true. I don't recall ever needing the strict comparison, but it seems to tickle the fancy of most js programmers.

Double-equals behaves differently than triple-equals. Minifiers probably can't swap them safely.

I wonder if this actually decreases the byte over wire. 5000 compresses a lot better.... sorry for OT

Interesting question. Has anyone tested this?

Almost certainly the minimizer

Totally possible that the minifier did this, yes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com